Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the metaverse. Still. I'm David Imel, and today we're talking about smart glasses. Meta announced a boatload of new glasses last night. There's new Ray-Ban Metas, including an audio-only version, and some new VR glasses. And last week, Snap showed off its new specs. The Verge's Jay Peters and Victoria Song are here to talk about it. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.
I'm David Imel, and this is 90 seconds on The Verge for Thursday, September 24th, 2026. Google has formally announced Project Sun Catcher, a new venture to test how well satellites with AI processors perform in space. The satellite's equipped with Google's Tensor Processing Units and will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on October 1st, harnessing the power of the sun in low Earth orbit. The goal of the mission is to test how well its TPUs handle the physical stress of space flight, as well as the radiation and the thermal extremes of space. Next, Nintendo has won its $4.5 million lawsuit against James Williams, a Reddit moderator accused of distributing pirated Switch games. In a judgment issued on Wednesday, a Washington federal court ordered Williams to shut down the online stores allegedly housing libraries of games. In the complaint, Nintendo claims that Williams had allegedly solicited donations of Nintendo eShop gift cards alongside physical copies of Switch games to be copied and distributed on online pirate stores.
Nintendo asked the court for a default judgment of $4.5 million after Williams didn't respond to the lawsuit. And finally, OpenAI artificial intelligence agents have hacked an Australian government website and attempted to breach numerous other government and university websites. Speaking on the sidelines at the UN General Assembly in New York, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the agent infiltrated Australia's Medicare statistics portal and accessed both public and non-public files. In a statement to The Verge, OpenAI spokesperson Oscar Haines said the models were attempting to look up answers during an internal evaluation and in the process took actions that OpenAI did not intend. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Thursday, September 24th, 2026.
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Jay and V, welcome to The Vergecast.
All right. So, we got to start with Meta Connect. We taped this after a press preview where you guys got to go hands-on with the new products, but before the actual public event that happened last night. Question for V. The Verge wrote a piece a few days ago called "Can You Forget How You Feel About Meta?" So, my question to you is, have you forgotten how you feel about Meta?
No. I have not forgotten how I feel about Meta. It is, that was a really big effort across, it was me, Mia, Hayden, and Lauren just kind of all, I called it the Meta Voltron while we were writing it and just kind of all coming in with their various expertise about how people feel about Meta kind of ties into the various tentacles it has, all of it has in all of these businesses and obviously I was addressing the glasses portion of it and their XR efforts and so that was like really kind of on display while we were walking through the Meta headquarters and it was kind of impossible to forget how I feel about testing these devices and then how other people feel about these devices now that they're increasingly in the wild and that was very much at the forefront of my mind. So, no, I was not able to forget how I and other people feel about Meta in general.
I think there's a clear reason why they probably decided to release some smart glasses without cameras even though they're still kind of barreling ahead with the cameras, but we're going to get to that. Jay, I want to talk to you first. The Muse agent is coming to these glasses, all these new glasses they're releasing. Can you tell me more about what that means exactly?
That means you can take the Muse agent, which is primarily run through an app on your phone, and you can be looking at something and ask your Muse agent about it. And so how that's different from like talking to just the Hey Meta more generally is in theory your agent is really dialed in to kind of your specific needs. If you've used it a while, maybe it understands your personal context a little bit better. And so in theory this agent is that much more helpful about telling you about what you're looking at. We were given a theoretical example of like we were speaking with Henry, which was a Muse AI agent for a 38-year-old marketing professional who wanted to be, who was really focusing on his fitness. And they had a bunch of food right in front of us. And so we could ask like, what is this food in front of us? Yeah, it was a food demo. And like which one is best for my macros? Can you add this to my cart? And you're just chatting with the agent on your glasses.
It was a little slow in my experience. Like you'd wait many seconds before it would respond to you, which kind of took it, it didn't feel as conversational as maybe just chatting through an app. But you can see how as Meta wants to make its glasses very smart and make them your constant AI companion for everything that you do, this is how Muse ties in with that.
It feels that that would require quite a bit of confidence in the fact that this AI agent is just doing things for you automatically, right? Cuz at least if you're chatting with it on your phone, you kind of see the tasks that it's taking. Did that seem weird to you at all? Did you feel like you wouldn't really trust it to do the right things?
Well, in one of my demos, it was looking at a box of protein bars. And it said, "This has 15 g of protein." And the box definitely said it had 20 g of protein. So you know, you have to like kind of the constant how much do you trust your AI to be telling you the correct information? That's still right now is a concern with using this agent. And it's not out yet, I don't think. It might be something that's coming later this year, but still, we, you know, we'd have to try it ourselves with our own agent.
I tried the same demo as Jay did, but like with a different pair of glasses. They just had like these stations set up. And I kind of had a similar experience where I was also just like you can't see that it's thinking. So I was like, there's no like do do do do do do. Like you don't know. Sometimes it'd be like, let me check on that for you. And then it's just silence while you just wait. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, is it listening? Did it forget? Is it just thinking? You know, this is really kind of demo versions. It could very much change before it gets public, but I was telling them like, you should make some like a way for me to know if it's actually doing something or if it's just like lost connection or whatnot. And I tried putting something into my cart and it was like, ah yeah, so these little granola bite bars, they're not part of the catalog. I was like, what catalog? So.
Let's break down exactly what new hardware they announced, specifically with the Ray-Ban glasses. So, you mentioned they have a new Meta Ray-Ban Gen 3, I'm assuming with cameras. And then there's an audio-only version. Can you guys describe the difference between the two? Maybe V take the camera version.
Okay, so just there's a lot that's coming out. And what I'm going to say is it's more. There's just more happening and a lot of that is to give new styles for everyone because the camera glasses, like we've got these Meta Ray-Ban Gen 3s on my face. And do I look like Jeffrey Dahmer? Because they're aviators. There's aviator versions now. Hello. I'm wearing them.
Or is it just different styles? What's different with the Gen 3?
Different styles. There are adjustable temple tips, so that's something that they took from the Optics glasses, which were meant to be more ergonomic and more prescription friendly. And so you have these temple tips here, which can be adjusted. They recommend you go to an optician to do that. There is six mics in these instead of five, so call quality should be better and they last longer, 1 hour longer than the Gen 2s. So, not a huge crazy hardware update on this front. There's these aviator glasses and this, it's not the warrior princess, but they have a Xena model and that's kind of like a geometric cat eye situation and then that's the Gen 3s.
And these are still Ray-Ban Meta, correct? They're not just the Meta glasses.
Okay. Yeah, these. We'll get into some crazy naming conventions as well. These are still the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 and then we saw the Ray-Ban Meta audio glasses, which are no camera. That's the big thing. No camera.
Well, how are they pitching the no camera version? I mean, obviously there's a big backlash against smart glasses right now. Meta is probably trying to salvage their reputation a little bit. It doesn't help as much when they're releasing camera versions and non-camera versions, especially if they look similar because people cannot really tell the difference. Jay, how are they like, how are they pitching that to people? Do they include any of that skepticism in there?
Not directly in the folks that we talked to. I mean, a thing to know about Connect is you're walking around Meta's campus and like the vast majority of people are wearing Meta glasses in some way. So, it's like this alternate reality universe where like everybody's chill with Meta glasses. But for the audio-focused versions, the big thing is that they're lighter and because there is no camera and in theory like less technology in the temples, that means they can offer slightly different styles. Like one that had, they're just, they're like thinner temple bands that like sit on your ears and I think that the styles look nicer, personally. They just look that much less like computer glasses on your face.
Think Mad Men '50s Clubmaster style glasses, kind of like the horn-rimmed.
Here, for folks on audio, it's the style where like there's like a little metal wire in the middle and you can see some plastic on top, but on the bottom it's more of kind of a, you can see the metal of the lens and this is not what the glasses are, but it is a close approximation of one of the styles.
Okay. I heard something about a hearing enhancement feature, but that costs extra. Can you talk about that?
It's FDA-cleared. It is, so, you know, EssilorLuxottica has a different type of glasses called Nuance Audio and they're just basically using AI to enhance the audio, kind of give it a converse, it's similar to conversation boost. It's similar to over-the-counter hearing aids that we've seen in the past. The FDA has given clearance because it's meant to be kind of an aid type feature. It does cost about $150 extra. The way that they told me it's going to work is that it's like it's a one-time fee that you pay up front. So, it's not necessarily like an extra fee or whatnot and then you just have it there. It's meant to be kind of an aid for people who need that. So.
Okay. Yeah, I mean, the more hearing aids the better, I would suppose, out in the wild. There's apparently also Dolby Atmos audio capture, spatial audio. Is that only on the audio-only glasses or is that on both of them?
I think that's going to be on any of them. So, a lot of the stuff is they're not gatekeeping things to the audio glasses only. I think the only thing about the audio glasses to keep in mind is that it's meant to, one, it feels like the timing is very pointed because hot surveillance summer, right? But they were very adamant in insisting that this has been in the works since 2024. Back when they launched the Meta glasses, there was a press event and Boz was there and he's just like, "Oh, you know, we know that people love using the audio. We're exploring audio only." So, he's kind of teasing it a couple of months ago before things really blew up with the backlash. So, it just happens to be that they're launching it at this time where people are like, "Ah, we hate these cameras." And so now we have a camera-free version that's only going to be audio. Very convenient timing for them. And the Dolby Atmos thing, I think that ties into another product that we saw today, but in general the audio you capture when you're recording is spatial now for immersive. That's the word. Like immersive content. So.
Right. Well, better than metaverse. But speaking of metaverse, it seems that Meta has not completely given up on the metaverse as they have announced a new pair of VR AR mixed reality glasses. Jay, can you take me through this? They're $12.99 launching in the spring of next year. It seems like an early announcement. What exactly are these things?
